Watching
by Victoria2
Summary: Sequel to 'Waiting'. Logans home, and everythings quiet. Marie watches old movies, and Logan watches Marie.


Title: Watching  
  
Author: Victoria (atlantic_iced_tea@hotmail.com)  
  
Rating: PG-13 to be safe  
  
Summary: Sequel to 'Waiting'. Logans home, and everything's quiet. Marie watches old movies, and Logan watches Marie.  
  
Feedback: Is worth more than gold. Seriously. Not that I'll pay for it just yet, but wait a couple of weeks and I might just get desperate.  
  
Disclaimer: I don't own these characters - Marvel, Fox and a bunch of lawyers do. But I bet they don't have as much fun with them as I do.  
  
Author's Note: This is for the people who liked 'Waiting' enough to ask for a sequel, sorry it took so long. I hope you like it.  
  
  
*******  
  
Logan returned home one October evening, back from his tour of the Canadian wilderness with nothing more than a rucksack of dirty clothes and a lot of unanswered questions.  
  
He had found nothing up North apart from the realisation that the affection he felt for the kid he had left down in Westchester was less than brotherly. It scared him. That he could feel so much for anyone other than himself. Up until the moment in time a scared young woman glanced at him across an Alberta bar, he had been a one-man show.  
  
He was a loner, an outsider, yet somehow Marie had cracked open a door for him that led into the real world. It was as if she was a beacon, casting light around him, allowing him to really see for the first time. Colours were brighter, more vivid. Sound crisper. A friendly glance didn't scare him the way it once had. He looked around him at the sky and the trees and all the other things he once thought sissy, and saw more than he ever thought possible. He looked at the people around him. He looked at himself. But best of all, he liked to look at Marie.  
  
She liked to watch old movies on rainy Saturdays. That was one of the first things Logan noticed about her after he got back. He liked to watch her curled up on the sofa, gazing wistfully at the television set. He figured it was the way her eyes looked, so soft, as if she could actually imagine herself there in the picture, playing out the heroine in her old black and white films. Logan could tell by the look on her face she believed in what those films told her about love. That it was attainable by the good and just, that romance was only ever perfect, that its purity could never be sullied by the wicked world.  
  
Marie didn't know he watched her. Logan only ever allowed himself a few minutes at the door of the TV room to look in on her. Sometimes her girlfriends sat with her, and he'd hear them hold back sniffles as the credits rolled, or see them come out dreamy eyed and slightly breathless. But his favourite times were when she was alone, and he could imagine he had her all to himself.  
  
Logan had been back four months. Four months of casual 'hello's' in the corridor, of careless chit-chat in the dining hall, of never having had a real conversation. He wanted to talk to her, tell her how he felt, what she meant to him - but couldn't. The Wolverine had no words to express his emotions. For fifteen years he had no use for the terms of endearment that others flung around so easily, never needed to verbalise the feelings that he himself did not even understand.  
  
So instead he avoided conversation with Marie. He was afraid that if they did begin to talk his resolve never to let his feelings emerge from within his steely exterior would disintegrate, and he would frighten Marie with garbled speech expressing thoughts that would confuse and embarrass her. He didn't want that. It was better never to let her know, keep the secret buried deep within and live with the pain it caused as it tried to claw its way out, urging him to act on his desire and take the girl in his arms.  
  
No. Instead he would stay away, be safe, satisfy himself with the few moments they spent together in passing and with the stolen glances across darkened rooms. It was wrong of him to love her - he knew that. She was so much younger; entitled to find a man worthy of her, not some washed up old bar brawler with no past and little future to look forward to.  
  
It was wrong, and this was his punishment.  
  
To love a woman and never tell her. To be around her and yet not touch her. To hear her laugh and not know the joke that caused her such happiness. He had to live in the shadows and scavenge whatever contact he had with her, like a bird pecking at breadcrumbs.  
  
He was lonely, being so near to Marie, yet apart. He couldn't leave though, not again. The time he had spent away from her in the snow laden wasteland of the North, fruitlessly searching for clues to his past, had been excruciating. After two years he had returned to home he did not belong in and to a woman who could never love him. It was torture, but one he would forbear because it allowed him to at least snatch a few moments with her, giving him something to cling to, some real connection, though it lasted but a minute. It was worth it, he thought - for her, it was worth it.  
  
So that's how he knew she liked to watch old movies on rainy Saturdays. Logan never paid to much attention to the actual content of the films, assuming that the one black and white melodrama he had once endured was like a template, a cookie cutter mould that all the other pictures conformed to.  
  
What he did not know was that the films Marie liked to watch - the ones she understood - were all tragically doomed romances, linked by duty and honour and consistency. All the lovers were consistent. No matter what happened, how the world changed, how much time passed, their love would never waver. Marie's heart skipped a beat at the end of 'Casablanca', of 'Gone With The Wind', and especially at the end of 'Now, Voyager'. Bette Davis' last line seemed to encapsulate everything she ever felt about her relationship with Logan.   
  
Davis stands in the study with the only man she ever loved, the only man who ever made her feel alive, the man who showed her she was beautiful - the man she could not have. Though apart, they loved each other, treasuring the memories of their brief affair for years. Then Davis takes his daughter as her ward, so that they will always be connected, in some kind of abstract way. They know that this is the closest they will ever get to each other, that despite their love they can never be together. He asks her if she will be happy, and she turns to him and says:  
  
"Don't ask for the moon, Jerry. We have the stars."  
  
When Marie first watched that, it was as if someone had looked into her heart, noted her every feeling, rolled it up, condensed it, and came up with those two little sentences. They were connected, her and Logan. No matter what, she would always have that.  
  
After Logan came back she had been afraid that being so close to him without actually being with him might kill her, but the Winter had passed painlessly, as if her love for Logan had gone into hibernation like the willowy tree's that surrounded the school.  
  
Maybe that's how it would stay, cocooned inside her forever, an ever present entity instead of a yearning so strong that it threatened to break her in two.  
  
But she could live with that. Because she loved him, and nothing could ever change that. It was as if she were one of the heroines in her films, destined to live forever with the burden of an unrequited love.  
  
She had vowed to herself never to let him know how she really felt, to save herself the shame she would feel as he turned her away, disgust on his face... No, she wouldn't put herself through that. She wouldn't allow it.  
  
Instead she would just patiently suffer through the knowledge that the man she loved was so close to her, and that she could never have him. Sometimes she wondered exactly what had happened with Logan when he was gone. What he had felt when he woke up, still ignorant of his own past, of who he really was. Sometimes she even found herself asking if he had woken up alone, or in the arms of some faceless woman that had been impressed by the animalistic pull of the man before her. It made her nauseous to think those thoughts, and she hated herself for even contemplating them. All they did was compound the distance she felt from Logan, the man she had seen inside of. They made her feel alone.  
  
Even if one day a miracle did happen, and Logan suddenly wanted more than to say a gruff hello in the hallways of Xaviers School for Gifted Children, some cruel fate had given Marie a skin cloaked in poison, forbidding her physical human contact for the rest of her life.  
  
It had been almost three years now. Three years without a comforting hand on her arm, a motherly kiss on her cheek, without even the chance brush against her side from a stranger. No, that was a lie. Logan had touched her, twice now. But each time she had almost killed him. Guilt welled inside her. She kept herself wrapped up, swathed in layers of cloth and gauze to prevent 'accidents'. She couldn't bear another of those.   
  
She couldn't get close to Logan then, there was too much standing in the way. Too many obstacles. So she made do with living a romantic life vicariously through film, through books, through the people around her. And through snatched glances of the man she loved.  
  
They were fated to spend their lives alone, isolated by their instinctive need to protect the other from themselves. They would never admit their feelings, their dreams for the future. Instead, they would stay apart, the pain of being alone tearing through them like a knife. They would content themselves not with physical or verbal contact, but with stolen glances from down turned eyes and the glimpses of the other in the hallway. With Watching.   



End file.
